You say that love is nonsense... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

Friends are born, not made.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

He had fallen into the usual masculine blunder of mixing up smartness of intelligence with strength of character.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.